By now you must have heard that blogging is important for your private practice? But I know what you’re thinking, “with all this practice building and seeing clients, blogging can’t be that important, right?” I would respond with a resounding
No, blogging is essential.
In fact, blogging is highly important for small business; especially for therapy practices.
Here is why
- Blogging allows clients to develop a relationship with you anytime day or night. When do people have a crisis? Who knows, that why is called a crisis right? But if they are having a crisis at 3:00 AM and you have a blog on 5 steps to ease depression or to cope with grief useful information for potential clients. Plus, clients get help from you even when you’re sleeping!
- As a small business, we need to have people in our community know we are here and how we can help them. Blogging gives you more visibility. When we blog, we are creating the ability for more people to find us on the web. Think of every blog as an opportunity to have people find you. The more blogs, the more pages you have indexed with your name, the business and your website. When a potential client is searching for a therapist and types in depression + your city that blog would come.
- Helps develop you as a leader in your niche or specialty just by putting down your thoughts on a topic. As you write, consider what is valuable to your reader. We forget that we have lots of knowledge that the public doesn’t have about topics that can help them. Blogging gives you a podium to educate people about what you already know. Further, blogging will position you as an expert, and that will translate into more potential clients.
- Having a blog that is active, it provides the reader the impression that your business is alive, well and healthy. When you click onto someone’s blog, and it has old posts or inconsistent ones it gives the impression that you don’t care. Additionally, blogging often can increase your Return on Investment (ROI) by as much as 13X according to HubSpot’s State of Inbound 2014 report.
- Therapists need to blog because we can’t take advantage of all the features of social media. Therapists can’t ask clients to “check in” or leave a review on their page or friend a client to send them a weekly special or discount. Our ethical standards may limit some of our uses. However, we can provide content to readers without asking for comments. By blogging, clients get to experiences what it would be like in the room with us. When we blog, the reader gets a glimpse of us and our personality. Blogging helps with the Know, Like and Trust, building relationships with clients that want to work with us.
Have I convinced you that blogging is worth the time it takes? I sure hope so. In a future blog, I will give you some ideas on what to blog about and a few tips on blogging. But until then just start writing and get your information into the world.
© 2017 All Rights Reserved, Therapist Practice in a Box, Sherry Shockey-Pope